A few people have asked me how I set up ZOË, so I thought I'd post it here. I'm not sure how much of a typical user I am. If you aren't familiar with ZOË, I think the about document on the web site gives a pretty good description. You might also try reading some of the reviews that are listed on the reviews page. One simple way to think about it is as a search engine for your email.
WIth my current setup I read all my email with IMAP. So I have ZOË point to my IMAP inbox and folders and index everything from there. I also store all of my sent mail on the IMAP server so that it gets indexed too. One thing ZOË can do is be an SMTP server for you. It will accept email and forward it onto another server (like your ISP for instance). But there's an issue with this that I'll talk about later. I've also been slowly adding in RSS feeds that I really like into ZOË so that it indexes them (though not all the RSS feeds I read).
So far I've been running it for a few days and I really like it. I actually have some old old email sitting around on my old windows box that I'm going to upload to the server so that it will get indexed too. Okay, now for the parts of ZOË that I think need improvement (and I'll say again, that even with its flaws I think it is great).
Okay, so the things I see as flaws in ZOË (btw, to the author of ZOË, feel free to think of these as suggestions ;), and also note that I have no idea how complex any of these would be to do. Knowing me, I've picked the things that are the hardest to change.).
- SMTP Server - ZOË has a built in SMTP server. So that if you want it to index your outgoing mail you can send it via ZOË. This is actually a pretty cool idea, but my big problem with it is that it doesn't work unless your mail server requires SMTP authentication. Out of all the places I send email, only one of them requires SMTP authentication. This would be so nice to have. Also, I'm not sure how the code works, but what I'd really like is a way to be able to set up multiple SMTP servers and then choose which one to use from a pulldown list.
- Importing/Reading in messages - There has been a little bit of talk on this subject on the ZOË mailing list. One thing I'd love for IMAP stuff is some kind of understanding of the folder structure on my IMAP server. The first is that there is some mail that I really don't care about indexing. By just saying 'don't index this at all' I solve the problem easily. While thinking about this I also realized I have a few mailing lists I am on that don't use header tags to identify themselves. One thing that would be neat is being able to designate certain folders as 'mailing lists' so they can be accessed that way (though I have the feeling that this is getting into the 'complex to do' category.
- Searching - There maybe something like this already, but I haven't found it yet. I'd love an advanced search form. Something where I can search for just subject or author. Or some combination of stuff.
That's all I can think of at the moment. Once again, a big thanks out to the author of this software, it really is pretty cool. I plan on donating once I am employed again.
